High Places EP

Ancient Almanac; 2007

Find it at:

It's not that Brooklyn's High Places remind me of a lot of things I like already-- minimal, bleary indie pop like Beat Happening or Young Marble Giants; subaqueous psychedelia from Ricardo Villalobos to Martin Denny exotica; girlish nursery-rhyme vocals; New York City; heavy syncopation; pentatonic scales; kissing-- it's that I usually only get to have them all together when I'm dreaming. High Places sing about dreaming. They sing about dreaming and evolution and writing letters-- to Mars, I think!-- and even though they sing about the haze of falling in love on "Head Spins", the closest they come to sex is watching hermaphroditic banana slugs swap sperm while clouds roll overhead.

This all happens in about nine minutes. Sure, they have a handful of other songs that they play live, but High Places are a relatively small, embryonic band, literally and metaphorically. There are only two members, Rob Barber and Mary Pearson. (Full disclosure: Pearson is the sister of a former Pitchfork employee.) They clink on glasses and hit hand drums and adorn them with spare guitar figures before sending everything through basic effects processors. In a recent interview I did with them, Barber explained, "I got to a point with visual art where I just wanted to draw. And so, with music, I just thought, well, there's delay, and that's awesome. And you can pitch things down, and that's awesome. And you can position things in weird places around the room, and that's awesome. So that's all we did."

So, think of the High Places EP as four short studies in escaping urban claustrophobia. Tripping out in your living room for a dollar a day. Without drugs. Barber has said that they feel like they're a very un-New York band, which seems off-- if anything, High Places' heavy-lidded sweetness and positivity are the kind of attitudes that make city life fresh, almost quietly surreal. Of course, they risk potshots from people too afraid-- too evolved?-- to appreciate, say, the way a leaf falls. Oh well. High Places are unflappable. They don't smile. These songs-- they're intimate enough to sleep in, rhythmic enough to dance to; lo-fi and simple, but strange enough to get lost in.

Gertrude Stein's long-form poem "Tender Buttons" was, prosody and etymological spurting aside, a book about warping the domestic into the unfamiliar. "Table: A table means necessary places and a revision a revision of a little thing it means it does mean that there has been a stand, a stand where it did shake." Yes! Yes. I can't reason it, but I can feel it-- it's a redefinition. High Places aren't modernist geniuses. Nobody will write books about them. But the effect is similar: take this small, ignorable, crappy thing and make it something else, something greener and more distant. Touch it, it's okay-- did you even realize it could feel like that?